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If you want to know if the person you’re flirting with is kinky, ask them if they’ve seen Secretary.
The movie, which came out in 2002, follows Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) as she begins working for lawyer E. Edward Grey (James Spader) as his secretary. In a scene that, undoubtedly, launched a thousand fantasies, Grey disciplines her for a typo in a letter. He instructs her to lean over the desk and read the letter aloud. And then, he spanks her.
I can think of other, more recent movies that center on kink: Nymphomaniac (2013), 50 Shades of Grey (2015), Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017), to name just a few. But when I watch these movies, something’s always missing.
None of them seem to fully capture the feelings that kink and power exchange can create in the same way Secretary does. That’s not to say it’s a perfect representation of BDSM and kink. For every kinkster who loves the movie, there is another person who can’t stand it.
What Makes This Movie Work? (And How Do We Bottle It To Make More Movies Like It?)
“The primary thing that’s going on in the film is ‘What is he actually making her feel?’ not so much ‘What is he doing to her?’” director Steven Shainberg explained in a Fresh Air interview when the movie was first released.
That explains how little is shown on screen. I counted seven scenes that featured any kind of kink or sex, and what is shown is pretty tame. The spanking scene I mentioned doesn’t show any nudity. Instead, the camera lingers on Lee’s face after she’s been struck. We see her working through her conflicted feelings: confusion, but also arousal.
By focusing on each character’s feelings, the anticipation builds in a way that feels very familiar. When Grey takes to doing sit-ups in his office, I smile; I know the feeling of doing something physical to try to work off kinky energy. All of that anticipation plays with our minds as much as the characters’. So the moment when Grey slams a letter on Lee’s desk, infuriated over her mistake, where he curls around her and whispers in her ear? That is hotter than the entire 50 Shades of Grey trilogy, and no one has taken off a stitch of clothing.
In and Out of Media, Kink ≠ Sex
Shainberg also shows a deeper understanding of how kink can function by separating it from sex. “It seems to be the assumption that kink is foreplay or that kink ends with sex or is incorporated with sex. And I think something that is less discussed is that for a lot of kinky people, it really is enough,” says Jillian Keenan, author of Sex with Shakespeare and the YouTube channel Kinking Out Loud.
At separate points throughout the film, both Lee and Grey say, in their own ways, that sex isn’t the point. We also get to see how kink can be grounding, cathartic, sexual, or not. We watch Lee flirt and brat out, purposefully adding typos to letters to get Grey to spank her again. We also see her go to Grey’s house after visiting her father in the hospital, looking for a way to get her feelings out through a spanking.
That’s not to say that the spanking, and the power exchange that comes with it, isn’t horny. It is. In one scene, Lee masturbates looking at a letter Grey has edited, his red Sharpie marks pointing out every typo she’s made. “The fact that [Lee] so clearly regards [getting spanked] as a sexual memory, a sexual fantasy for her to masturbate to … Something doesn’t have to be sex, but it can still be sexual,” Keenan adds.
Love Can Be Pain
But perhaps more than anything else, it’s the gentleness that Shainberg shows that feels the most resonant. At the end of the film, after an intense scene that stretches for days, Grey carries Lee up to his apartment and bathes her. He lathers shampoo into her hair, careful to keep the suds out of her eyes, while she lies back in the warm water. After she’s toweled off, he stretches her out and kisses every self-induced cut on her body.
Secretary gets this part of BDSM right: You can’t have the spanking and nervousness and holy-shit-are-we-really-doing-this without these quiet, centering moments.
This softness is not something that we see all that often when showing on-screen depictions of kink. But kinksters talk a lot about aftercare, the process of helping both sides of the slash come down from a scene.
Dottie Easton and Janet Hardy, co-authors of The New Topping Book liken the process of aftercare to decompression, a way to return to “normal consciousness.” “After the formal scene is over, most players want and need some decompression time – hugging, cuddling, talking, dozing, waiting, showering, what it takes to stabilize both of you back in the real world,” they write.
They add an important detail, one that bears repeating. “It’s a mistake to think that aftercare is offered for the bottom’s sake only. Many tops need this kind of warmth and reassurance as well.” These moments of reassurance can be small; after giving Lee her first spanking, Grey folds himself over the desk, completely out of breath. And Lee moves her pinky just enough to overlap with his finger. It’s such a subtle movement, but it hits me right in the chest.
“It’s a really kind of beautiful reflection about how the kind of connection that BDSM can create and foster between partners can be big and loud and dramatic windmill-type spanking or it can be something as small and quiet and subtle as a finger overlapping another finger,” says Keenan.